There can be no doubt that when it comes to our housing crisis, the present Government of Ontario has not been part of the solution. Their adaptation of the Silicon Valley ethos has been amended to “Move fast and break things and then glue them back together fast before mom and dad get home!”
This is not the way to run a province. As council sat down for their meeting Tuesday, reports began leaking that the government of Ontario was looking to reverse its decision to dissolve Peel Region. It’s bad enough that Doug Ford routinely breaks promises to the living, but he’s now breaking promises to the dead, in this case the late Hazel McCallion.
Flip-flopping is now a matter of provincial policy, and even if we’re to take the Province at their word that things like the Greenbelt scandal were committed in the name of creating more housing, we’ve lost an entire year because it seems like the Ontario government announces policy and then comes up with the regulations before realizing it’s a bad idea and changing course.
But enough about the provincial government. Unless Doug Ford is visited by the Ghosts of Housing Past, Present and Future this Christmas he’s unlikely to grow and change for the better.
Let’s talk about the work of council this week instead, which was essentially the planning policy equivalent of the Chernobyl liquidators; they had to race out and throw as many radioactive planning decisions over the side of the roof as possible before being fatally poisoned themselves.
Back in April, the then-Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark, who’s now radioactive himself due to the Greenbelt scandal, made 18 changes to Guelph’s Official Plan, one of a dozen municipal plans he took a red marker to in the last year. In October, new minister Paul Calandra said “Bygones” and introduced legislation to undo those changes.
Then it gets even trickier. Municipal councils – or more specifically the mayors – were asked to submit to the ministry any changes originally made by Clark’s office that they might want to keep. Good idea? Not when you take into account how those changes were made in the first place.
It actually starts before the new Official Plans were handed out earlier this year. Reporting from The Globe & Mail this week said that along with other questionable meetings that took place between ministry staff and developers around the Greenbelt, some Official Plan changes were made because developers had straight up asked for them.
“The documents shed light on how directives from political staff converted just under 200 hectares of employment lands – areas set aside for commercial or industrial purposes – to residential use and rezoned small parcels to increase density and height limits,” the Globe piece read. “In two official plans – Hamilton’s and York Region’s – political staff copied and pasted the developers’ requested wording into the official plan.”
Now, there was no insight into the process around Guelph’s Official Plan review in the documents, which were originally obtained by Environmental Defence and Ecojustice through a Freedom of Information request. It’s also worth noting that none of these businesses have been accused of doing anything illegal. Getting the velvet rope treatment from ministry staff is not, in and of itself, criminal.
Having said that, at least one of the groups delegating at this week’s meeting seemed more than happy to abandon the typical planning process they were pursuing in order to take their case directly to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, and why wouldn't they? If you can jump over the complex and intricate local processes and have a more receptive audience just give you thing you want and have it stand without appeal, wouldn’t you?
Of course you would, and that’s the point. The question I have though is why even a slim majority of council would want to go along with it? Wasn’t overriding properly made and approved planning decisions the whole point of the umbrage that led to the flip-flop on Official Plans to begin with?
But there’s nothing wrong with bending corners in the name of being pro-business, right? We don’t want to be seen as anti-business, do we? Remember the “Guelph Factor”? [Solemnly shakes head.] And hey, these are trusted local developers. They wouldn’t try to put the wool over our eyes, would they?
To me, the unwillingness to observe our processes at the City, regardless of how you feel about them, is not a convincing argument to trust the proponents. In fact, one of the tipping points of the Greenbelt scandal was when a landowner of a property in Ajax started shopping it around to developers, apparently to the surprise of the government that made it possible.
“At no time was the intention to sell or change the ownership structure disclosed,” the Ford government said in a statement at the time. “This lack of transparency raises serious concerns about the owner’s ability to meet the government’s expectation that homes be built in a timely manner.”
Perhaps we need to understand that our planning processes are not red tape meant to obstruct, but guard rails to make sure that the public is being well served by the allocation of precious resources like land and water.
And what are we supposed to think when a development planner comes to council and threatens to pull a project if council doesn’t do exactly what they want? You say you’ve done a decade of work on a plan to develop a site, but if you have to follow the proper process then it’s game over and you’ll go elsewhere to presumably start again from scratch?
It’s times like these that don’t foster trust in the community. Who do we believe? The developer taking shortcuts? The provincial government that unsnaps snap decisions? The city councillors trying to balance public appearance with oversight responsibilities? The City staff who are caught in the middle?
We the people are entitled to get what’s promised in these Official Plan reviews, a completely transparent process that allows for fulsome community engagement. If developers just get to pick and choose what they want to do with land regardless of community considerations, why even bothering to have an Official Plan, or a community for that matter?
